Tag: hypocrisy

The allegation that Euodia Roets is a hypocrite for misappropriating RW Scott’s photograph as the basis for the sketch she contends Woolworths, in turn, misappropriated ignores a few important issues. First, was Ms Roets’ sketch actually an infringement of RW Scott’s photograph? Secondly, Woolworths’ failure to comply with the Creative Commons license Wikipedia applies to its content could have profound implications for Woolworths. Lastly, this debate highlights a remarkable degree of ignorance of the law in the digital marketing and creative industries.

The hypocrisy allegation misses the bigger point. It assumes a degree of knowledge on Ms Roets’ part that, by apparently relying on RW Scott’s photograph as the inspiration for her sketch, she was infringing his copyright in his work. As I pointed out in my previous post, to the extent Ms Roets lacked permission to create a derivative of RW Scott’s work, her sketch (which is likely still protected by copyright) probably infringes RW Scott’s copyright. RW Scott’s son, Greg Scott, commented on htxt’s blog post about this story:

My dad, R. W. Scott was the photographer of the original image. He gave me the rights to the digital image. years ago, around 1990, perhaps. I scanned his slide, edited out an overly complex background, and posted it on GregScott.Com and have given rights to use the photo for reference to many artists, provided they they don’t sell a “direct copy”, that is, that they should make creative interpretations of the image. From my perspective, I’m assuming that both works of art are licensed derivative works,and that Woolworth’s has compared two similar images and chosen one work over the other. Clearly two works derived from the same image can be legitimate, and yet have a strong resemblance.

I don’t see any wrongdoing here, except perhaps for making unwarranted accusations without adequate facts. It does bother me that people seem to assume that big business (Woolworths) is in the wrong, when they bought and paid for the image from the artist. If there are license/copyright issues here, I only see a potential concern with the Wiki text.

This would seem to address the allegation that Ms Roets’ infringed RW Scott’s copyright by creating her derivative work, namely her sketch, and undermines the allegation that Ms Roets is a hypocrite.

The Wikipedia License Issue

As Mr Scott pointed out, this leaves the issue of Woolworths’ use of Wikipedia’s text without complying with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license which governs Wikipedia content use. This license requires Woolworths to do a few things in order to comply with the license which include –

correctly attributing the Wikipedia article the text was drawn from; and, more significantly,

licensing the Woolworths design "under the same, similar or a compatible license”.

This would be a pretty interesting development because it would take Woolworths’ commercial design and release it into the Commons for re-use in ways I am sure Woolworths did not anticipate. It will be interesting to see whether this product remains on the shelf or is withdrawn to guard against this occurring and to remedy Woolworths’ failure to comply with the license terms.

Ignorance

As I mentioned above, the hypocrisy allegation implies knowledge of wrongdoing on your part while complaining about being wronged. I believe a more appropriate term may be “ignorance”[1] which is remarkably common and which has emerged fairly strongly in commentary about the story. The underlying issue here is that most people are ignorant of the legal risks they face, particularly creatives, and what the law actually says. In fairness, the law is complex and evolving. That said, there is a lot of poor quality information being disseminated as authoritative and is being relied upon to make bad decisions about content and a range of other issues.

I’ve noticed a high degree of ignorance of basic legal risks at larger agencies and smaller creative studios alike. I took a look at about half a dozen large and medium-sized agencies and only one had a set of terms and conditions and a privacy policy framework. The rest have a simple and redundant copyright notice with no further provisions dealing with data protection, content licensing, liability or a range of other themes a decent legal framework is designed to address. This is likely due more to ignorance of the risks these agencies face and what is required to reduce the likelihood of those risks manifesting than a conscious decision to leave the businesses exposed to unnecessary risk.

Given that larger agencies and studios leave themselves exposed to these risks, it is not surprising that small agencies and freelancers are similarly ignorant of the risks they face, especially considering their budgetary constraints which tend to focus their attention on growing their businesses rather than delving into important, though expensive, legal frameworks.

As the saying goes, ignorance of the law is no defence although, in practice, not having many instances of agencies and design studios being sued for rights infringements which could be avoided with adequate legal frameworks leads the industry to complacency. Essentially, agency management doesn’t see the value in appropriate legal frameworks because none of the other agencies have been sued yet. Call it an ostrich strategy or a diabetic strategy, it is troubling and it is going to lead an unfortunate agency to disaster one day.

Returning to this story, perhaps Ms Roets’ critics should consider how prevalent ignorance of the law is in this industry and how many of them have taken the time to acquaint themselves with the facts and accurate representations of the law which governs their activities? It is practically an epidemic.

I haven’t communicated with Ms Roets and don’t have any specific insight into her awareness of the copyright issues at all. ↩